How C-SPAN summit aided final push

For months, White House aides dismissed the controversy over Barack Obama’s failed pledge to put health negotiations on C-SPAN — suggesting it was little more than a Beltway obsession, far from the worries of everyday Americans who just wanted better health insurance.

But in private, Obama was growing tired of hearing he broke his campaign promise.

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Months of congressional negotiations had been anything but transparent, and that was bad enough. By January, Obama was starting to worry that the prolonged legislative wrangling — with all the side deals and late-night sessions — was sapping public confidence in a bill he hoped would be a cornerstone of his presidency.

“The president was more acutely aware of it,” a senior administration official told POLITICO in an interview Tuesday. “He understood very much that the process had impeded the product. He agreed we had to clean the process up, and only that way, the product would have a chance.”

Obama’s solution, which he settled on while writing his State of the Union address, was to embrace an idea from chief of staff Rahm Emanuel — to hold a daylong summit at which Republicans and Democrats would debate the bill on C-SPAN.

Democratic leaders in Congress held little hope of a breakthrough, and some dismissed it as a waste of time. But the White House, in retrospect, views it as a “really big turning point” in Obama’s ability to sign a landmark health bill into law Tuesday only two months after it was deemed politically radioactive, the official said.

Polls suggest the summit wasn’t able to erase public doubts about the bill or the process, presenting one of the Democrats' biggest hurdles as they try to sell the reforms passed late Sunday night in the House.

But the White House believes Obama’s decision to convene the summit was an opening for a do-over on several key points — a chance to give the bill more transparency and more credibility and to move Obama back to a central role after a year in which he ceded the process to Congress.

Not that Republicans have bought into the argument.

On the first day of floor debate over the package of fixes Tuesday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has led GOP criticism of the Democrats’ closed-door negotiations, hit the C-SPAN argument again while introducing an amendment striking what he called “sweetheart deals” from the bill.

“Eight times, the president of the United States said in the campaign that all negotiations on health care reform would be conducted with C-SPAN cameras in the room,” McCain said. “He said we’ll find out who is on the side of the pharmaceutical companies, who is on the side of voters. Unfortunately, these deals were made out of the view of the C-SPAN cameras. In fact, behind closed doors.”

In some ways, the summit capped a monthlong White House rescue mission for health reform after the Massachusetts Senate shocker, the election of Republican Scott Brown. To the public, it seemed like the White House was strictly focused on whether to pass a smaller bill, or stay big, with a comprehensive reform package.

In fact, contrary to the rhetoric from Democrats that voters don’t really care about the legislative sausage making, the White House, in that post-election period, concluded the process was central to the bill’s livelihood and spent considerable time trying to make up for their mistakes.